The Empress's Tomb (4 page)

A gust of wind blew through the room, rustling the newspapers I'd tossed to the floor. I turned my sweat-speckled forehead to catch the breeze and caught sight of an unnaturally pale face framed by wild, white hair peering at me from the fire escape. When I shrieked in
terror, the face grinned and disappeared. Seconds later, my bedroom door swung open and my bespectacled father poked his head inside.

“Still alive?” he asked, checking the room.

“Barely.” I was feeling a little faint from the shock.

“Boogeyman?” he asked.

“Spider.”

Having earned a degree in entomology, my father's sympathies lay with the insects of the world, and he never missed an opportunity to bad-mouth an arachnid. “Repulsive little creatures,” he said, shivering with disgust. “Did you know they dissolve their prey's innards and then suck them out like a Slurpee? They're the eight-legged serial killers of the arthropod phylum. But just remember: You're bigger than they are.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said.

“That's my job,” he replied as he shut the door with a smile.

Once I heard his footsteps fade, I ducked through the window and onto the fire escape. Kiki Strike was leaning against the wall, waiting for me, her chic black clothes blending into the night. She wasn't exactly the picture of a princess—at times it was hard to believe she was human. Though the poison she'd consumed as an infant hadn't killed her, it had drained her skin and hair of color. And because the attempt on her life had left her allergic to most forms of food, she was unlikely to grow more than five feet tall. At fourteen, she was like a creature from a sci-fi movie, shockingly beautiful and strange.

“Sorry I'm late,” she whispered. Even in the dark, I could tell there was something wrong. Her ice-blue eyes
were bloodshot, her cheeks had sunk to new depths, and she hadn't brushed her hair in days.

“Twenty-four hours. I think you've set a new record for tardiness. Where have you been? I was sure you'd been kidnapped. I've spent all day trying to locate Livia.”

“Verushka was sick. I had to take her to the hospital.”

“Verushka's in the hospital? What's wrong with her? Is she going to be okay? Can I see her?” The questions shot from my mouth like badly aimed bullets, and my vision blurred as tears flooded my eyes. Not only was Verushka the kind of guardian I always wished I had—funny, understanding, and handy with a bazooka—I knew it was she who'd convinced Kiki to invite me to join the Irregulars. Without her intervention, I might have died of boredom long before I reached high school.

“Verushka's back at home. She's doing fine. There was something wrong with her leg—the one that Sergei Molotov shot. It started turning blue a few days ago. But the problem's under control now. In fact, she'd be mad if she knew I told you. She wouldn't want to you to worry about her. She's a tough old lady. I once watched her stitch up her own head wound with a sewing needle and some fishing wire. She'll probably outlive us all.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” I said. “But how are
you
feeling? You look like you've been dipped in Wite-Out. Are you sure you didn't catch something at the hospital?”

“Nothing a little danger can't cure. What do you say we finish the map tonight?”

“I can't. Some of us have to go to school in the morning. My teachers have been complaining that I keep passing out during class.”

“Want me to take care of them?” asked Kiki with an arched eyebrow that I was afraid to interpret.

“I think I can handle them on my own,” I assured her. “But I really do need to get some rest. My mother threatened to have me deported to the middle of nowhere if my grades don't improve.”

“Come with me tonight, and I promise you'll get a nap tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh yeah? How are you going to do that?”

“It's a surprise. It won't get you into any trouble.”

“But I don't want to go to the Marble Cemetery tonight,” I moaned. “It's too much work.”

“See,” Kiki countered with a cocky grin. “I thought of that, too. If you get dressed fast, we can use the entrance in Iris's basement. Her parents are at a cocktail party.”

“And her nanny?”

“The nanny locked herself in the bathroom an hour ago. She polished off a bottle of cooking sherry, and now she's singing show tunes to herself.”

“I don't know, Kiki.”

Kiki's smile faded as she chipped a piece of paint off the rail of the fire escape. Beneath all the bravado, something was still troubling her.

“You win,” I huffed. “Stay here while I slip into something a little more practical. But you better think of a foolproof plan to get me out of school tomorrow.” Back in my room, I reached out the window and handed her the front page of the
New York Times.
“Here's a little something to read while you wait.”

“Yeah, I've seen the squirrels,” Kiki said. “As long as they're on the loose, they should keep
me
out of the
papers. Thanks to the zoo footage, nobody's looked twice at me all day. That butt on the surveillance tapes was undeniably male.”

I poked my head out the window. “Worried your fifteen minutes of fame are finally up?”

“Relieved,” Kiki corrected. “Another fifteen could get me killed.”

•     •     •

In June, the Irregulars had rewarded eleven-year-old Iris McLeod with an honorary membership. Not only had she saved Kiki's life, she had also discovered a foul-smelling perfume that kept the man-eating rats of the Shadow City at bay. Without Iris's help, we could never have continued our explorations once our Reverse Pied Pipers stopped working. The kazoolike devises had been designed to produce a noise that rodent ears couldn't bear. For a while, the Reverse Pied Pipers had worked wonders, leaving only a few deaf rats to roam the tunnels. But over time, that handful of beasts had multiplied into a million-rat army. The large, fierce, hearing-impaired rodents were again on the hunt for trespassers, and anyone without the protection of Iris's perfume quickly took his place beside the hundreds of rat-picked skeletons that littered the passages and chambers of the Shadow City.

I squeezed my eyes shut and held on to Kiki's black leather jacket as she steered her Vespa motor scooter onto Bethune Street without bothering to slow for the curve. When we skidded to a halt in front of Iris's brownstone, the first thing I saw was the Irregulars' logo stamped on the sidewalk. An
i
in the shape of a girl
in motion, it marked all known entrances to the underground tunnels. Beneath an old trunk in Iris's basement lay an ingeniously disguised trapdoor. A long, rusty ladder led to a hidden room seventy feet below street level that had once belonged to a bootlegger named Angus McSwegan. According to
Glimpses of Gotham,
a nineteenth-century guide to the
dark side
of New York, each bottle of Angus's whiskey was spiked with a dash of formaldehyde, which gave it a nasty kick. It had been the beverage of choice in the Shadow City, which lay just outside Angus's door.

I saw Iris watching at the window as Kiki and I climbed the steps of her stoop. Before we had a chance to ring the bell, the door flew open, revealing a tiny blond girl in an oversized white coat.

“Greetings, Irregulars,” said Iris. Like Kiki, Iris was unusually small for her age. Unlike Kiki, she possessed a set of cherubic cheeks that were often pinched by strangers who mistook her for an eight-year-old.

We brushed through the door and into a front hall lined with the hideous masks and shrunken heads that Iris's parents collected on anthropological expeditions.

“What's with the lab coat?” Kiki asked Iris. “Don't tell me you've been experimenting on the nanny again. There are laws against that sort of thing, you know.”

Iris giggled. “I forgot I had it on. I was getting ready for tomorrow.”

“What's tomorrow?” I asked. “Are you in a play?”

“I've been practicing for the meeting tomorrow, remember?” Iris looked offended when I shook my head.
“DeeDee and I are presenting our big discovery. The one we've been working on all summer? Remember now?”

I didn't, but I figured it was best to play along. “Oh right,
that
presentation. Yeah, we're all really excited.”

“You
should
be. My discovery's going to make the rat-repelling perfume look like toilet water.”

“Speaking of rat-repellent,” said Kiki, “we'll need a new bottle for tonight. I ran out last time, and I had two hundred rats chasing me like I was made out of marzipan. By the way, want to come?” It was her way of apologizing for forgetting Iris's presentation.

“I'd love to,” Iris said. “But my parents will be home any minute. Plus, I want to make sure everything's perfect for tomorrow. If you need perfume, there's an extra bottle in the trunk downstairs. Just make sure you're superquiet on the way out. My mom thought there was a burglar the last time you guys were here.”

“Sorry about that,” said Kiki. “Oona slipped on her way up the stairs.”

Iris's nose twitched at the sound of Oona's name. “That was
Oona
making all the noise? Little Miss Criminal Mastermind?”

“Can't you two get along?” Kiki sighed. “All this arguing is beginning to bore me.”

“I get along with
her
just fine,” Iris complained. “It's not
my
fault she doesn't like me. On Monday she said that if I didn't get any taller you guys were going to sell me to the circus.”

“She did?” Kiki sounded both appalled and amused.

“Just because she teases you doesn't mean she doesn't
like you,” I tried to assure Iris. “Oona teases all of us. She doesn't know any better. It's like she's socially retarded.”

“Retarded or not, she'd better watch out,” Iris fumed, “or one day somebody's going to teach her some manners.”

We heard a door open upstairs, and a tone-deaf rendition of “Hey, Big Spender” rang through the house.

“Time to go,” whispered Kiki, pulling me toward the basement. “See you tomorrow, Iris. And whenever you feel the urge to put Oona in her place, be my guest.”

“Thanks,” said Iris with a mischievous giggle. “Maybe I will.”

•     •     •

The temperature dropped with every step we took down the ladder that led from Iris's basement to the lost city beneath Manhattan. At the bottom, I shivered as I shined my flashlight around a chamber decorated with crates of rotgut whiskey and the rat-picked skeleton of Angus McSwegan, whose jaw hung open in a toothy smile. I unfolded my map. The last unexplored tunnel was on the east side of the Shadow City, more than a mile away.

“We'd better get going,” I said with a yawn. “We've got a long walk ahead of us.”

“Good!” For the moment, Kiki's worries were forgotten. “I'm in the mood for a stroll.”

Beyond the chamber lay a broad, stone-lined tunnel. One side was blocked by a mound of rubble, the result of an unfortunate explosion two years earlier that had sent DeeDee Morlock to the hospital and Kiki into hiding. The other side of the tunnel stretched ahead of us. A
monstrous gray rat bolted from a hole in the wall and vanished into the darkness. As we passed the doorways that led to the Shadow City's abandoned saloons, gambling parlors, and thieves' dens, we could hear the patter of a million tiny feet all around us. Thanks to Iris's rodent-repelling perfume, the rats kept their distance, but we both knew they were waiting for an opportunity to attack.

We had just turned a corner in a familiar part of the tunnels, fifty feet below the crypts of Saint Patrick's Old Cathedral, when Kiki grabbed my arm and pressed a finger to her lips. A wooden door stood open, blocking the path in front of us. At first I felt the same unnerving sensation you might experience if you returned from school one day to find your books rearranged or your bedspread upside down. But when I saw what was painted on the door's wooden boards, I almost sprinted for an exit. While the Irregulars loved nothing better than a new chamber to explore, we were always careful to avoid doors that were locked from the outside and labeled with a single red cross. We knew all too well what we would find. Whoever had opened the door, it wasn't one of us.

On the silent count of three, Kiki and I leaped in front of the doorway and lit the chamber with our flashlights. The floor of the room was stacked with skeletons, some still dressed in moldy dresses and moth-eaten suits. These were the citizens of the Second City—the criminals and con men who had met their Maker when the plague of 1869 swept through Manhattan's hidden tunnels. The few survivors had locked the sick and dying in rooms labeled with a red cross. Their cruelty had prevented the disease
from spreading to the world above and ensured that the Shadow City would lay forgotten for over a hundred years.

“I don't see anybody,” I told Kiki as my flashlight circled the room. “Do you think the door could have opened on its own?”

Kiki examined the lock. “I doubt it,” she said.

Just beyond my flashlight's beam, something moved and I was overcome by a familiar terror. As many times as I'd visited the Shadow City, I had never been able to shake the feeling that some of the dead were still roaming the tunnels.

“Maybe it was one of them,” I said, training my flashlight on a skeleton wearing a straw boater. “Maybe it was a ghost.” A large bulge appeared beneath the dead man's shirt and crept slowly across his chest. A rat emerged at the collar and bolted past us as if it had been called to dinner.

“You're such an optimist, Ananka,” Kiki joked. “Let's
hope
it was a ghost. But keep your eyes open. There may be somebody down here. Haven't you noticed anything strange in the past few minutes?”